What is LINK?
LINK is a three week internship experience all juniors at Animas complete. It is intended to give the juniors the opportunity to experience the reality of the job they are interested in pursuing as a career in the future. We are outside of school for three weeks, working side by side with a mentor, learning what it means to really work in our field of interest.
LINK is a three week internship experience all juniors at Animas complete. It is intended to give the juniors the opportunity to experience the reality of the job they are interested in pursuing as a career in the future. We are outside of school for three weeks, working side by side with a mentor, learning what it means to really work in our field of interest.
About 4 The Children! http://4thechild.org/
4 The Children is an umbrella organization for two different programs, who's services 4 The Children provides. These two programs are the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program , and the Supervised Exchange and Parenting Time (SEPT) program. CASA provides children of dependency or neglect cases with a court appointed advocate, intended to ensure children in foster care receive the advocacy needed for judges to make decisions in the best interest of the child. SEPT is intended to give children a safe place to visit with their parents or exchange between homes with minimal emotional risk for both the children, and each parent.
4 The Children is an umbrella organization for two different programs, who's services 4 The Children provides. These two programs are the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program , and the Supervised Exchange and Parenting Time (SEPT) program. CASA provides children of dependency or neglect cases with a court appointed advocate, intended to ensure children in foster care receive the advocacy needed for judges to make decisions in the best interest of the child. SEPT is intended to give children a safe place to visit with their parents or exchange between homes with minimal emotional risk for both the children, and each parent.
Anticipation and Preparation
11/5/18
I have a solid step by step plan that I feel confident about. I am stressed and worried about contacting people for the internship, but I feel great about my plan to get through that. |
1/11/19
I have had to change my link plan which is really stressful, but I believe I have a good new plan. Starting with contacting one of my relatives who has experience in the PICU field. |
4/5/19
My entire plan for link has changed. I am no longer pursuing any type of nursing field. Instead I am going after Counseling. |
4/9/19
My Internship is now confirmed! Ashley Hein has agreed to be my mentor, and allow me to learn about 4 The Children. |
I encountered many challenges during the process of finding my internship. Not only did my plans to leave Durango not work out, but I also changed my field of interest really late. I originally wanted to work with a Pediatric Intensive Care Nurse. I contacted two different people in my family who work in hospitals about me interning with them, or someone they knew, but to no avail. As I started to discover the truly heartbreaking intensity of that job, I decided it really wasn't something I could handle. I took my need to help others, in a different direction, Counseling. I contacted two different counselors in hopes of finding someone who would be willing to let me intern with them. Again, nothing. Finally, I was introduced to Ashley Hein, and 4 The Children. It was a perfect fit for me, seeing as I want to be a foster care advocate after college. From this Link I hoped to gain more experience communicating in a professional setting, insight on how to remain a neutral third party in some of the hardest moments in a families life, and learn how to remain calm when dealing with emotional people. What I bring to 4 The Children is my genuine passion, and need to help to children. I have been caring for the children in my family for as long as I can remember, and that is the root of my passion to advocate for children. If my mentors remember one thing about me I want it to be that!
My LINK Project
I had a two different sections to my LINK project. The first, was to create an activity book of crafts. This book acts as a fun, creative way for the visiting parent and children to bond. This also helps as a great ice breaker for children to initiate contact with their parent, when asking them for help with instructions. At 4 The Children we primarily see kids younger than the age of 10, this book was also made for some of our newer families with kids who are a bit older. The final part of my project was Community Outreach, and resources gathering events. While I was 4 The Children we went to many different places in the community to put ourselves out as a resource, as well as gather other resources for our clients. We visited Pueblo Community College, The Durango Daybreak Rotary club, The La Plata County Family Center, and Pediatric Partners, to learn about what they do, what resources they offer, and to inform them about ourselves. We went to 92.9 a local radio station to promote an event at Lively Boutique we were holding, to get the availability of our services into the community. Below is my activity book, and an image I created to display all of the places in the community I was able to visit during my LINK.
Coming into LINK I expressed to my mentors that I felt one of my strongest skills was organization, something I knew was useful to them. 4 The Children is still a relatively new organization, which means they still had some work to do on the organizational side of things. My mentors were able to put my skills to use for their needs. I spent s few days scanning their case files, and turning them into digital documents, that can be accessed by all of the 4 The Children staff. I was able to use my own organization system, to ensure I was being as efficient as possible. This benefited everyone. It helped my mentors to complete a task none of them had time to do, and it allowed me to use a skill I have developed to help someone else. Which made me feel to be needed at 4 The Children.
I learned so much from the SEPT program specifically over my time at 4 The Children. Both in the communication to both parties and during the visits themselves. The first would be learning to deal with aggressive parents. No one wants to be court ordered to have only supervised visits with their children, and this can make parents really difficult to work with. On the first day of my internship we had a visiting parent who was trying to be very manipulative and avoid our rules, and I got to watch the way my mentor interacted with them and respond to them. This showed me the true amount of patience it takes to work with families in these types of situations. The next thing skill I developed was how to make children feel comfortable in this particularly uncomfortable situation. At 4 The Children we do this through intakes with the child (if they are old enough to effectively communicate). In these intakes we establishing “safe phrases” for the children so that if at any time during the visit they want it to end or they want to take a break from their parent, they have the tools to do that in a safe environment. During my LINK I learned how to take objective unbiased notes during supervised visits. Objective notes are intended to not be influenced by personal feelings or opinions towards the parents or children in any case. They are simply notes of what they did, and in some cases what they said during the visit. The final, and in my opinion one of the most valuable skills I have ever developed, is learning how to communicate with people in a professional setting. Over the time I was with 4 The Children we did a lot of community outreach and resource gathering, putting me in situations where I had to talk to professionals in their field about the work of 4 The Children. Not only did I learn how to communicate professionally, but I also learned how to incorporate informal conversation into professional settings. During the first week of my internship 4 The Children hosted a Sip N' Shop Event at Lively Boutique in Durango. During which I walked around the shop talking to the customers about the organization, and through many of those conversations, as well as many others I heard, I learned how to communicate informal conversation with professionalism.
During LINK the most challenging thing I had to face was having severe Social Anxiety in a setting where you are constantly communicating with people. Whether it was contacting families about scheduling, or meeting with members of the community we were always talking to people.To put it into perspective, I am terrified of talking to large groups of people about topics I know like the back of my hand, and here I was preparing to talk on the radio about an organization I had been with for only a few days. Similarly at Pueblo community college, DayBreaker Rotary, and Pediatric Partners, I was asked to talk to these groups of people about my position as an inter at 4 The Children. I found myself in unavoidable positions which made me fight past my fear of how I would perceived. As we did more outreach, I could feel myself becoming more excited to hear that we were going out into the community than staying in the office. After my internship ended I found myself trying to find everyone I could to tell about my experience, and the organization itself. Although I am still highly stressed over the way I will perceived when talking to other, I feel so much more prepare to work through the situation than ever before.
As I mentioned above 4 The Children is a 19 month old organization, so they still had some organizational needs regarding their files. One of my main responsibilities at 4 The Children was to scan, our case files, turn them into digital documents, and organize them by family. I spent more than a few days scanning and transferring these files, a few days no one else on the staff had to spend. I believe my help with the files, was immense to my mentors. All three of my mentors only work part time for 4 The Children, and have so much work they do outside of the office. Having a High school intern helps to limit their stress and complete tasks that have needed to be completed, but weren't due to lack of time.
I have always wanted work in social work. Whether it be mental health or child welfare. While working with 4 The Children it resolidified my need to work for children. To be an advocate for children. My plan from now is to become a foster care advocate, to try and help fix a system that is broken, and putting these children at risk because of it.